Top Spots: Sound

Published on June 01, 2005.

PS2 "War"

No, there's nothing wrong with the sound on your set. That's Alphaville's "Forever Young," though slowed down and sounding a bit warped. The confusion and cringe factor fit well with a graphic wartime scene of a soldier shot down while running through burning wreckage toward a helicopter. After he dies, his body fragments and floats to form a visibly shaken gamer ready for more. The chorus kicks in with the tag, "Play forever."

It's rare that lyrically complicated music closely tied to picture is written after the spot is animated, but that's what happened to former Presidents of the United States of America frontman Chris Ballew. Shown a spot of a runner's life as a series of scenes that he sprints through, Ballew wrote a song that perfectly captures the runner's life stages with chord changes and stand-alone lyrics. Words like "Heavy times they just got lighter/That yellow sun just got so much brighter" fit the joys of running but wouldn't be out of place in a hit single.

A tired joke-men don't do laundry or share the remote-and a cliched music track-the Richard Strauss theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey-manage to work together to make something truly funny in these spots for what the Brits call crisps. Skilled direction and courage to venture into familiar territory make the song and concept into a revelation when a crisp-crunching male offers the remote to his wife or puts laundry in the dryer. In slow-mo, no less.